The Tin Horse: A Novel (16 page)

“And she zings him for reducing her to a cultural stereotype?” The scene had made an impression because Paul and I had three Shahn prints. “Is that you?”

“Jewish and left-wing, yeah. Different generation, so different cultural signifiers. Old roach clips in the junk drawer, every album by Bob Dylan, the Stones, and, in my mom’s case, Joni Mitchell. And my dad’s pictures were silk-screened posters for protest marches and rock concerts. They were made by the graphics collective he was in … until he went to work for an ad agency in Denver. That’s one reason he and my mom split up—she thought he’d sold out.”

“Do they still live in Denver?”

“My dad does, with his wife—she’s a third-grade teacher. After they split up, when I was five, my mom moved to Leucadia, one of those beach towns north of San Diego. She does massage and holistic healing. Like I said, a cultural stereotype.”

“Five, that’s rough.”

“Nah. My stepmom’s great, and my dad is all left-brain practical, while
my mom is right-brain visionary; I get to take what I like from each of them. And you ought to see me on an airplane. Nobody can get perks from the flight attendants like someone who’s flown as an unaccompanied minor.”

What did Harriet say? Each of us has a unique version of the history of our family. And I suppose everyone has reasons for coming up with—and believing—a particular story, like Josh’s glib account of how painless his parents’ divorce was for him. But I don’t believe him. And I wonder which of my stories, my memories, would strike a listener as … well, not as fiction, since I happen to believe in objective reality. But what in the way I color my telling—my choice of words, whatever I emphasize or gloss over, tone of voice—might seem chosen to protect me or someone else from pain? Or blame?

It’s relaxing to sit back, close my eyes, and listen. During the next fifteen minutes or so, I throw out a few questions and learn that Josh has two half sisters in Denver, and his mother has had a couple of serious relationships but mostly “she did the hippie single-mom thing” in a house that was tumbledown and drafty, but who cared, since it was two blocks from the beach.

He could be describing Carol, who named her son after Bob Dylan—the son with whom she got pregnant when she was a sophomore at Sonoma State. Paul and I pleaded with her to marry her boyfriend or (even better, since she was only nineteen) get an abortion, and no matter what, to stay in school. She did none of those things. Like Josh’s mother, she bumped along, raising Dylan on her own, despite a number of relationships and making what I fear is a subsistence living working for the costume department at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Aunt Pearl would be tickled; she taught Carol to sew. Carol is also a weaver and does her own original designs, intricately worked leaves and birds and flowers in subtle hues—not my taste, I like bold colors and abstracts, but they’re works of art. If only she had a smidgen of Pearl’s drive! She refuses to market her work. She’s always disdained ambition … but of course, that’s my perspective, the side I staked out in our fights when she brought home B-minuses, even C’s from school. Playing out
my
cultural stereotype. Do any of us escape? Barbara, maybe she did.

We’re coming into the city now, Boyle Heights is on our right, and Josh asks, “Do you want me to take you to your son’s house?”

“Thanks, but I’d like to go home first and pack a few things.” And, like any injured creature, I have an urge to return to my nest. “He can come and pick me up.”

“Y’know,” he says, “now that you’ve got the name Kay Devereaux, you could do some data searches. Legal records, things like that.”

Of course, that’s the way to proceed, rather than taking a cockamamie drive in the general direction of Colorado Springs. I could look for public records of marriages, divorces, real estate transactions, legal proceedings. Deaths. If she was ever charged with a crime or went to jail.
Is that why Mama and Papa kept this extraordinary secret? Because my sister, who had thought nothing of shoplifting as a child, was involved in something illegal?

“I’m pretty good at that kind of thing,” he adds. “Let me know if I can help.”

“Thanks, I will.” Though just thinking about having to fill Josh in, to give him an idea where to start looking, exhausts me. Have I ever had to tell anyone the whole story, starting at the beginning and trying to get across who Barbara was and how she left? Philip, I told him. But everyone close to me—my family, Paul, Boyle Heights pals, some of whom have remained my friends for life—they all knew what happened; they lived it, too. As for my kids, they picked up the story in bits and pieces, and gradually Paul and I filled in details and depth.

After all this time, is there really any hope of finding her? And do I want to? As Harriet said, finding her now could lead to any of a number of outcomes, not all of them happy. Despite being a Californian, I’m not someone who believes in omens, but look what happened when I simply drove in the direction of Colorado Springs. As if the universe were posting a giant “Keep Out!” sign.

At my house, Josh insists on walking me inside. I give him two twenties for gas. But buying him a tank of gas doesn’t feel like enough thanks for what he’s done.

“Wait!” I say.

I go into the den and survey the Ben Shahn prints, hanging in a cluster on one wall. I plan to give the subtle, almost Japanese-style “Blind Botanist”
to Carol when I move and the Passover Haggadah illustration to Ronnie; my favorite, the surreal “Branches of Water and Desire,” will come with me to the Ranch of No Tomorrow. But really, I’ll have almost no wall space there. I reach for the print but feel a pang of resistance, almost a physical pain. I remember the day Paul and I bought that print and the spirited discussions we used to have about it, usually over drinks—was the giant bird perched on the roof of a house, or was the structure some kind of boat? What accounted for the bird’s swagger, his wide-open, knowing eye? Well, I’m under no obligation to give Josh a Shahn. I can show my appreciation with a nice bottle of wine. Yet …

And then I realize what I want to give him. I go into my office and take down the desert photograph by Alan Yardley. It’s part of the story of Barbara, a story to which Josh has added a fresh puzzle piece and, I think, acquired some small degree of ownership.

I dust the frame with a tissue, then bring the photo out to him. “I want you to have this.”

“Elaine, I can’t … Is this an Ansel Adams? All I did was give you a ride.”

“It’s an Alan Yardley.”

“The man in Philip Marlowe’s file?”

I nod, and he takes the photo from me.

“Wow. Thank you.”

He asks if I want him to stay until my son arrives. I say no. I want a few minutes in my nest alone.

“Hey,” he says on his way out the door. “I like road trips. Next time you feel like taking one, call me.”

I
FIRST NOTICED OUR FAMILY
’
S GHOST AT THE BEACH AT OCEAN PARK
. It must have been the summer I was five, because I remember Audrey being there in a bassinet—and both Zayde and Pearl were present, so it was before Pearl got divorced.

On our weekend beach outings, the adults occasionally took a quick dip to cool off, and someone always accompanied Barbara and me, standing guard when we dug in the damp, ploppy sand at the shoreline, and clutching our hands in a death grip when we ventured into the sea. By far, though, the top adult pastime was lounging under umbrellas in canvas chairs. They ate, talked, read a little. They looked at the ocean—Mama sometimes stared at the water for hours—or lay back with their eyes closed, luxurious in their few hours of rest. The one exception to all of that indolence was Papa, who charged into the ocean and swam his mile.

Papa swam his mile whenever he got the day off and could come with us to Ocean Park, so I had heard variations of that phrase many times. “I’m going to swim my mile,” he’d say, and stride briskly toward the water. Or someone would ask where Papa was, and another person would respond, “Swimming his mile.” It was part of the casual flutter of language constantly swirling around me, one of many references to events in the adult world that I took for granted. On this day, however,
Papa swimming his mile
became a treasure chest of ideas so huge and thrilling and dangerous, I nearly burst trying to absorb them:
Swimming
, which involved lying on your stomach facedown in the ocean, but instead of choking and coughing the way I did when a wave splashed in my face, you moved through the water. A
mile
, the kind of distance you traveled by car or streetcar (on foot, you went for three or four or ten
blocks
), yet Papa was going that far in the ocean.
Swimming his mile
also meant Papa went into the ocean deeper than just up to his chest, which was the farthest I was ever allowed to go; even deeper than a step or two beyond where he could stand, as Pearl sometimes did, giggling and shrieking and then scrambling to regain her footing.

Papa went so far that, from the beach, I couldn’t see him.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mama asked when I clung to her. “Please, Elaine, it’s too hot.”

I didn’t have the words to express the tumult of feelings my new awareness had stirred up—terror that Papa would never return, excitement that he was doing this thing that took strength and courage, and also the sense that I had shot to a more complex level of understanding everything, and I was on the edge of an exciting but challenging new network of meanings.

Mama put the back of her hand on my forehead. “Here, come into the shade. Drink something.”

She poured me a cup of lemonade in which the ice had long ago melted. I sipped the tepid drink but could barely swallow. My gaze frantically swept past the dozens of bathers frolicking near the shore and fixed on the few bold specks beyond where the waves broke that were swimmers. Did Papa always come from the same direction after he swam his mile? Oh, why had I never paid attention?

At last I spotted him, his wavy black hair and mustache glistening with water, his wiry-strong legs jogging across the beach. I shot to him, and he gathered me up against his cool, dripping chest.

“What is it, Elaine?”

“Did you swim your mile?”

“I did.” He laughed, for a moment as carefree as a boy.
How old was he then? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?
“Do you want me to teach you to swim?”

“Yes!” I said, my faith in my athletic papa overcoming my timidity.

“Let me get something to drink first. Then I’ll give you your first lesson.”

Surprisingly playful, Papa trotted like a pony and carried me back to our cluster of umbrellas and chairs. There, my recent leap in awareness disappeared. The adults seemed to be talking in code, their conversation as foreign as when I heard the Yamotos down the street speaking Japanese.

“Forty-eight.” Zayde shrugged and held up his arm to display his wrist-watch.

“Actual swimming?” Papa said. “Or did you count getting into and out of the water?” His voice sounded light, like he was joking, but, held against his chest, I could feel how tense he’d become.

“Same way I counted forty-two,” Zayde said.

“Pa.” Aunt Pearl rolled her eyes. “Harry was just eighteen. And the water’s rough today, isn’t it, Bill? I heard them say there’s a rip current.”

“Harry” must be Uncle Harry, Papa’s older brother, whom I’d never met because he died before I was born, fighting in the Great War. It was the one thing I understood. I tried to catch Barbara’s eye, but she was playing with baby Audrey and ignoring the simmering tension among the adults, as I suppose I had done in the past.

“Pearl, forget it, will you?” Papa put me down without looking at me.

“Here, Bill.” Mama’s hand lingered on Papa’s as she gave him a towel. “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Seventeen,” Zayde said. “He was seventeen. It was 1914.”

“Well, you see?” Pearl said.

“Is it too much to ask to have a towel that’s not full of sand when I get back from my swim?” Papa shook the towel hard, without taking a few steps away, and the gritty sand blew on us.

His uncharacteristic anger made me think twice before approaching him. But I wanted to learn to swim!

“Papa?” I moved toward him as he dried himself with the towel. “Papa?”

Maybe he heard my voice tremble. Or he’d worn his anger out. “What is it, Elaine?” he said gently.

“You said you’d teach me to swim.”

He hesitated a moment, and I braced myself for a no. But he smiled. “That’s right, I did.”

As a swimming instructor, Papa was more patient than when he drilled me in poetry or history. He made a game out of putting our faces in the water and blowing bubbles. That first day, I went from blowing bubbles with Papa holding me to not being held at all. Soon he taught me to do a dead man’s float, and by the time I was six I could swim the crawl.

As I got a bit older, I sometimes swam out beyond the breakers with Papa. And as the tendrils of mature reasoning I’d first noticed that day at the beach grew, I realized that the key to the conversation that had baffled me was Uncle Harry’s forty-two-minute mile, swum when he was seventeen—and that Harry’s ghost stroked, always a little ahead, when Papa swam his mile.